As I watched from my TV with a newborn baby, I was physically ill at the sight of those not able to escape New Orleans as the ravaging effects of Hurricane Katrina flooded their city and threatened their lives. The city was special to me, as I had honeymooned there 12 years earlier. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that we had a state of the art military yet our own people could be suffering so much (was I the only one who couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t fly in food and water, or helicopter, boat, etc people out?)
Only a couple of weeks had passed since I had attended Education Week at BYU, feeling particularly moved by the stories of women speaking of getting involved at both community and global levels with charitable work. I called the Red Cross who said what they needed was cash. It makes sense, but it’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to get my 4 young children involved serving others, making something, giving something for those who had lost so much. Cash just felt so impersonal.
So I decided to have a yard sale. My girls (in kindergarten and 2nd grade at the time) made flyers for their class telling them we would include items they had in the sale. We had a couple of families reply and we picked up their items. We teamed up with my sister who lived 45 minutes away. And then we went through our things. We pared down to what we needed and wanted at that moment, everyone gave to the point that it felt good, which was just past where it hurt. Everything else went away. One of the phrases that stuck with me from Education Week was the idea that sometimes we hold onto our possessions thinking we might need them one day. She said “they need it now.” That was our theme.
We spent every night for a week hauling items, sorting them and preparing for the sale. Exhausted, we ordered pizza the night before and asked the kids to pray that our efforts would matter to someone. We wondered aloud if we’d even make $50.
Our husbands had gone with a group to help with the wreckage and so that morning my sister and I managed our brood of 7 children ranging from 3 months to 9 years old as we ran the sale. The kids had made signs indicating where the money was going and I don’t know if it was the charitable attitude of the buyers or of our own to let things go, but it was a wonderful fall day. The haggling was friendly and it felt that every dollar we took in was an act of love, though the buyers were most certainly getting deals of their own.
That afternoon we gathered the remainder of the items and took them to a local women’s shelter. As my sister drove, I unfurled the cash we had been stuffing in our wallets. The total was beyond our expectations as we counted $970 in sales. Most of it was $1 or $2 at a time, we had no idea our total was so high.
And is true in any real act of charity, we were rewarded more than the amount we were passing on. I had learned not to judge my ideas, not to listen to the voices of those who say my efforts were a waste of time (I heard this a lot as we planned the sale). I also learned the value of working within the parameters of what people are requesting. The real need of the charity was cash, and my need was to reach out and involve my children. Neither of us would have been served by either my dumping a bag of clothing at the Red Cross nor by my simply writing a check.
It wasn’t a huge success to anyone but me, but it gave me a sense that I can do things to make life just a little bit better for someone else. What have you done to feel like this?
Mel, I love how you figured out a way to meet both your need and the need the Red Cross told you they had. As a bonus, you were able to empathize on some small level with those who were without material belongings by separating yourself from some of yours.